Sim City Review
After his amusing One Minute Review, Jared makes a serious discussion to review Sim City. Synopsis The last Sim City was Sim City 4 back in 2003, and EA wasn't expecting how many people wanted to play a new Sim City game. Sim City does a lot of good things, but has some questionable design choices like being always online and the servers suck. The game is a lot simpler to play. Roads link up everything, and sewers and power lines are handled by the roads and become the skeleton of the city. Curved roads are neat, but the grid system is still better. It's nice that the roads are simplified, but everything needs to be on roads, reducing creativity. It doesn't look as nice. Jared couldn't even put trees up the way he wanted, providing a more constrictive experience. Jared liked the tax system. The player gets paid every hour rather than year, so the player gets a little bit of money more frequently. This makes the game more involved. Citizen requests also happen, and there are mandatory and optional requests. There are always consequences for this. Throwing a party creates more trash. Jared likes the modules that make the buildings more efficient. It also looks a lot nicer. There is always something to fix, and everything needs tweaking, so there is always something to do, but the player never feels like they are succeeding. These pop up too frequently. Jared got a complaint because 1 person didn't know how to use a hospital, so these messages got annoying. The city limit will be hit very quickly. Cities aren't very expansive. Every city in previous games always felt big. EA said that they may increase the city limit, but we know that won't happen. There are no randomized city maps either. Every map is always going to be the same. It isn't possible to terraform either, which restricts the game further. The game is online even in single player, and the servers suck. There are more servers now, but there are still problems getting into the game. It is possible to join other people and build cities near each other, and help each other out like giving resources to each other. It's a really cool system, and other cities can be seen in the distance. Communicating between each other can make a bigger network that all works well together. Everyone needs to pitch in to pull all these resources that benefits everyone, but it is not possible for one city to do it by itself! Trying to do this with one city will involve the city running out of room for everything else because of the small city limits. It's not practical to play in multiple cities. If the servers go down, regional benefits are switched off, which ruins your city. The player needs to become self-sufficient, which is too hard to do because of the size. Connecting to the servers is too hard, and players get booted for 20 minutes after a failure before attempting to reconnect again! Or an error message appears saying that nothing was saved. Cities can't be rolled back when mistakes are made either. Don't play around with disasters either! They're permanent! The forced multiplayer with bad servers, and the small city sizes restrict the game. The player will want to move onto another city very quickly. The simplicity is great, but it restricts creativity. The game gets a 3 out of 10, and when the servers are fixed, it gets a 6 out of ten. Don't buy it now. What should you do while you wait? Jared has been playing the Super Nintendo version. Category:Videos Category:Reviews